


A Land War in Asia

by executrix



Category: Blake's7
Genre: B7 kinkmeme, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-10
Updated: 2013-07-10
Packaged: 2017-12-18 07:45:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/877340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the B7 kink meme prompt, “Travis forces Avon, either by means of truth drugs or physical (but not overtly sexual) torture, to tell him his fantasies about Blake.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Land War in Asia

PART I

_VIZZINI: I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in a land war in Asia" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line"!_

“Take his bracelet,” Travis said. The mutoid, demonstrating the initiative that had kept armies composed of human beings for millennia, did precisely that. She stepped back, holding a machine pistol in one hand and the teleport bracelet in the other. 

It seemed far too much trouble to give the mutoid detailed enough instructions to keep the machine pistol out of Avon’s range. Travis gestured impatiently for Avon to sit down in the metal chair (bolted to the floor) and put his hand within reach of the cuff bolted to the metal table (bolted to the floor). Then Travis slid into the other chair (bolted to the floor). 

“I’m sensing that you don’t trust me,” Avon said. “It’s bad for business.”

“Of course I don’t trust you,” Travis said. “On your way to a lifetime in exile for a massive fraud, you stole an alien spaceship. What are you looking for, the applause of a grateful populace?”

“What I’m looking for,” Avon said, with emphasis, “Is a chance to get off the alien spaceship for friendlier climes where your—people—aren’t trying to kill me. And, of course, a large amount of money.”

“But you don’t know that **I’m** not going to kill you, right now. I could, with impunity.”

“And we both know that. But why would you? There’s no profit in it for you. They wouldn’t give you the reward for capturing me, it’s all in a day’s work for you. If you ever get hold of that supposedly splendid computer of Ensor’s, you’ll need my consulting services to be able to do anything with it. And, at any rate, you can’t kill me yet, I haven’t told you anything useful.” 

Avon knew that this was less than logically irrefutable, but he hoped that he was enough of a Scheherezade to enthrall Travis for the necessary two hours or so. Two and a half hours at the most. 

He also knew that, with a little leisure, he could collect the money he had taken from the Central Bank, but he was not averse to having the Federation provide some start-up funding, and who better than himself to virtually collect the bounty on his own head? 

“Bring me the tray,” Travis told the mutoid. The mutoid, of course, obeyed, after a second of trying to figure out what to do with the items in her hands. She braced the machine pistol under her armpit and put the teleport bracelet on the tray. For a moment, Travis watched Avon trying to look impassive while wondering whether he could grab the weapon and do anything at all, within the ambit of the handcuff, before Travis could shoot him. “No, put the bracelet on the file cabinet, out of his reach,” he explained to the mutoid.

“’Can’t get good help,’” Avon said. “Isn’t that what everyone always says? Certainly, that’s Blake’s problem as well.” 

“My God, just look at you,” Travis said, gesturing toward Avon’s midnight-blue tunic. The sleeves, quite the opposite of Blake’s (a selling point) were tight at the shoulder, belling out and then caught at the wrist in the same embroidered ribbon that formed the collar and the placket. “What kind of a fight does Blake expect to put up with his man poncing about dressed like the Principal Boy in a panto?”

“That’s rich, coming from a man in fetish gear.”

“This is my uniform!” Travis said indignantly. 

“Space Command must have taken advice from psychostrategists,” Avon said. “About the…ah…element they wish to attract.” 

“Supreme Commander Servalan is the head of Space Command!”

“Yes, and they lock up the Patrol Scouts when she’s in town. Not really the best advertisement.”

“Here, drink this,” Travis said, pouring fluid out of a very dodgy-looking bottle into one of a pair of dented metal bowls.

“No, thank you,” Avon said.

“D’you think it was a request?” Travis said. “Anyroad, you think you’re being clever about my not wanting to kill you just yet. Don’t contradict yourself.” 

“It might have a delayed action.” Avon sniffed at the liquid and touched his tongue to it cautiously. The experience was so horrible that he tilted his head back and swallowed the contents—he estimated it at about three ounces—in a gulp. It could have been nothing but poor-quality alcohol. Avon could not, unlike the demigod of ancient myth’s encyclopedic recognition of tobacco ashes, identify interrogation drugs by taste, particularly when so hideously covered up. 

Travis poured a second cup and drank it himself. “There, feel better now?” Avon wondered if Space Command rations included homeopathic doses of truth serum, or if, perhaps, cyborgs were immune. Or Travis simply didn’t give a monkey’s toss about what he said to Avon, which Avon didn’t think was the best of omens.

Travis refilled Avon’s cup and pushed it at him. Mercifully, a little splashed out of the top. “To your very bad health,” Avon said, sinking the second cup. “Although if you go around drinking this stuff voluntarily you don’t need any of my madelictions.” 

“You what?” Travis said.

“Mal-e-dictions. Curses.” 

Travis turned his head (far enough to see out of his good eye) to see what the mutoid was doing (exactly what she had been doing five minutes before, she hadn’t moved a muscle). He shook his head. “It’s like trying to negotiate with a bleedin’ swivel chair.”

Avon took advantage of the brief window of opportunity to switch the position of the two cups. Then, when Travis turned back, he said, “All right. Time to put my cards on the table. Would you like the details of Blake’s next planned action?”

Travis hammered down another shot, coughed, and nodded. 

“The data store on Arkaeon, the one with the information on the families of state enemies. It’s in a hardened underground bunker…”

“Tell me something I **don’t** know, sunshine.”

“So it’s not particularly amenable to aerial bombing. The plan is tripartite. The first team will teleport down, infiltrate the ventilation system, and use a malodorous but harmless gas to flush the personnel out of the bunker. The second part involves using some small fires and minor explosions at the periphery of the base. The third, crucial part is to take advantage of the diversion to attack the computers themselves, using powerful magnets to erase the data, and then, just to be sure, blow up the tarial node to prevent the data from being re-installed.” 

“That’s not going to work,” Travis said.

“Of course not!” Avon said. “I’ve told Blake that often enough. I’ve no intention of being around for this latest fiasco. Deploying three teams of ten for this rather trivial action is ludicrous, it leaves only eight behind on Liberator, and half of them will be having sleep or stand-down shifts.”

Travis filled the cups again. He couldn’t remember if his was the one with the dent near the bottom or the one with the chipped rim. 

“That many? Liberator has a crew of…?”

“Thirty-eight,” Avon said, hoping to God that added up. 

Travis got up from the table and fetched an acetate pad and stylus. While his back was turned, Avon switched the cups again. Travis squinted at the cups but still couldn’t remember which one was his, and anyway the contents were probably antiseptic. 

“Here,” he said. “Write down the names of all the crew members.” 

“You know about Blake, and Jenna, and Vila, then we collected Gan from Cygnus Alpha, and the alien from Auron.”

“And you, of course.”

“I’m doing my best to get myself off the roster,” Avon said, absent-mindedly emptying another cup as he started to list names. “After that, I’m not entirely sure of the order that would go on their security badges. If Blake had any, of course. I think the Greenaways were next—a brother and sister, Chaz and Meridia, we—that is, Blake—answered a distress call, and they decided to stick around. Then we got ten more people from Avalon—I think it was a job lot, actually, she wanted rid of them. That was…Ackway, and Dutroc, and Seddon—I was glad to see her, about time there was someone who knew something about computers, and Hixspaeth, Jenna was glad to see him, at least some of the emergencies happen on the other pilot’s watch now, and…Frizzell, was he then or later? Oh, this is hopeless. The reason that personal ident numbers are ten digits long is that that’s about as many meaningless items as one can remember at once.”

“Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it,” Travis said. “You expect me to believe you haven’t memorized thirty-eight subroutines for your precious computers?”

“Oh, well, I care about **those**.”

Travis poured another round, and got up to pull a printout from the security computer. Avon thought about switching the cups around again but couldn’t be arsed. Travis handed over the printout and took another drink while Avon read it. “Any of these look familiar?” he said. “It’s a list of deserters, wonder if any of them fetched up with you?”

“These photos could be anybody,” Avon said, musing that it was the downside of security cameras if you had oceans of data, none of it actually useful. “And I do think we have a B. Johnson and a Williamson of some sort, but it looks like yours is female. Hmmm—any relation to Dev?”

Travis flicked a switch under the tabletop. The walls were suddenly filled with images of Blake.

“You seem to take quite an interest,” Avon said, almost kindly. He was glad that his voice did not betray the hammering in his throat. Or at least he was too drunk or drugged to notice.   
“  
Of course I do,” Travis said. “Before I met Blake, I was normal.”

“Now if that isn’t a rich vein of implications.”

Avon, by accident or design, knocked over his cup. Travis told the mutoid to bring a rag or a towel or something, got impatient waiting, and started mopping the spilled liquid with his not terribly absorbent sleeve. 

That allowed Avon a chance to cross his legs and reach his free hand to the heel of his boot as he looked up at the murals formed by the projections.

“Blake seems to be in some sort of altered state, although I suppose in his case we can rule out religious ecstasy. And he’s got rather a lot of clothes on so I don’t think they’re boudoir pictures. Unless he got started without you and all you could think of to do was snap pictures?”

“You know damn well what I was doing,” Travis said, and for a moment Avon thought about the mutoid taking the pictures and tried to look nonchalant. “Has he had you yet?”

“I notice you don’t ask if I’ve had him yet.”

“Don’t make me laugh.”

Avon shrugged. “It’s not relevant,” he said. 

“All this time. Not much of an advertisement for your powers of seduction.”

“All what time? We’ve scarcely been there long enough to open a door without wondering if it’ll be wired with plastique or there’ll be a carousel or a model dairy farm behind it. And the new recruits least of all, of course.”

Travis’ eye, the pupil immense in the dark, dark iris, flicked around the picture gallery on the wall. The Blake Museum. Musee de Beau Blake. He said, “Is that what you think about doing to him? Do you want to hurt him?” his voice avid, forced through a tight throat. About suffering he was never wrong.

Avon looked down and saw he was holding another dose of whatever it was Travis was plying him with. “It seems rather surplus to requirements, considering what’s already been done to him. I wouldn’t say I’ve never played games of that sort, but…only if the other person found it amusing as well.” 

“Then what do you want from him?”

“He’s a commonplace person,” Avon said. “If I expected to be there any longer, I wouldn’t mind the occasional bout of commonplace sex.” 

“You don’t expect me to believe that,” Travis said. “In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if anything you told me wasn’t….some sort of a…” (he was going to say “taraddidle” but that was too difficult so he said “Tale.”)

And then the teleport called to the second bracelet concealed in his opulent sleeve (the one that the mutoid commandeered came from Liberator’s ample supply of broken bracelets--their leading export; Avon was fairly sure that there wasn’t enough left to reverse-engineer) and Avon vanished, having taken the precaution of opening the handcuff with the lockpick drawn from his boot heel.

PART 2

 _Just yesterday your printing press was smashed. Now they’re asking your home address._ (Richard Peaslee , _Marat/Sade_ )

Avon arrived at the teleport bay, where his crewmates were gathered around Rosveld Gbenge, the objective of their mission. While Avon had diverted Travis—in whatever sense of the word—Blake and Cally had teleported down and, as prearranged, taken the radical journalist to safety. 

“How’d it go?” Blake asked. “Perfectly smooth at our end, not so much as a shot fired in anger or a blow struck.”

“No problems,” Avon said. “Travis isn’t daft, you know—he pointed out almost half of the things I told you were wrong with that Arkaeon plan.”

“Avon, it wasn’t a plan as such,” Blake said, refusing to be drawn. “It was a training exercise.” 

Avon started to say that saying something stupid wasn’t an exercise for Blake unless breathing was, but he wasn’t sure if he wanted to make a scene in front of their guest, so he reserved the option for later.

“Thank you, my friend,” Gbenge said, clapping Avon on the back. “The second front you opened was invaluable.” 

They had never seen anyone with such dark skin before, but only Gan was candid enough to stare. Blake’s and Gan’s hair was jealous. 

“For the two hours’ traffic of your stage, you persuaded Travis that you would turn traitor to your crew! What an actor you must be!”

“Part he was born to play,” Vila said. “Like the Count of Monte Cristo. He could barnstorm about in it for years.”

Avon broke free and waved a languid hand. “Anything for my crew. Perhaps you know the Terran idiom, ‘I’ll swing for them’? Vila most of all. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just go dress for dinner. I believe a special meal is in prospect, although I can never convince Blake that lamb is meant to be as rubicund as his politics.” He strolled off, as the crew members looked puzzled; they didn’t plan to leave the flight deck before dinner, not least because profound and verdant libations were being poured. And anyway, if their clothes were good enough to rescue Gbenge in, they were good enough to share a meal with him.

As soon as he got past the bend of the corridor and expected to be unobserved, Avon broke into a canter, rolling up his sleeve as he went. He crashed through the medbay door, stuck a blood sample into the analyzer, and was comprehensively sick into the sink. He cleaned the sink while he waited for the sample, which showed an impressive concentration of poor-quality alcohol but nothing else other than a warning he was going to develop cold symptoms in three days.

Then he went back to his cabin, set a space speed record for the Cold Vapourshower event, and donned a pair of dark grey velour trousers, a white shirt, and a gilet in silvered violet, and returned to the flight deck, his hair still damp.

PART 3  
 _And, for because the world is populous,  
And here is not a creature but myself _

Someone tapped on the door. Feeling ridiculous—because nobody could see through the door—Avon pulled his dressing gown off its hook and put it on. “Sod off,” he said. 

“Avon!” Cally said (he felt vindicated that his first guess had been right). 

“I’m perfectly well and I haven’t a pain, and it’s lovely rice pudding for supper again,” he said. 

“I can never tell if you’re making a joke or not,” Cally said. 

“Don’t worry, Earthborns often have the same problem. I went to the infirmary first thing and checked myself out, and I’m fine.” 

“Rozzy is telling the most marvelous stories about Central Security,” Cally said. 

“How jolly for him,” Avon said. 

“And you needn’t be self-conscious, at first he was showing Jenna and me some awfully complicated dances, but now that Vila’s made some drinks in the centrifuge out of eagleapple pulp when we finished the cocktails…” (the mention of alcohol was enough to send Avon clasping the door frame in a death grip) “and now they’re just doing some sort of dance all in a line, you’d pick it up in no time.”

“Like haemorrhagic fever.”   
“Suit yourself,” Cally said. “You can’t say I didn’t try.” As her footsteps vanished down the corridor, Avon hung up his dressing gown again and climbed back into bed in the dark. He was grateful that she hadn’t appeared a few minutes earlier, when the embarrassment factor would have been even greater. 

But it wasn’t really dark; there was a line of pinpoint lights at the join of the wall and the carpet, presumably to stop you braining yourself en route to the lavatory. 

He closed his eyes and resumed his interrupted reverie. In reality, he had produced an efficient if streamlined orgasm and cleaned up after it. Behind his closed eyes, he was twined around Blake, enjoying being sticky and replete. The thermostat setting was at five out of a possible six. He imagined that Blake would keep his cabin at the equivalent of a bedroom with a salubriously opened window even in the cold season, and that Avon wouldn’t mind because he would be perfectly warm enough. Blake liked being outdoors. They had a mission once, there was soft grass that was spangled with small white flowers with golden centers. Grass would be comfortable to lie down on, if the others could be persuaded to go away. Avon reminded himself that it was **his** fantasy, they’d all go away except Blake if he told them to.  
The sheet Avon was wrapped in was slick fine cotton but it wasn’t smooth as skin and he was lonely and yearning and chronically terrified, really, instead of being clasped and protected.

 _Some people claim there’s a woman to blame,  
But I know, it’s my own damn fault._ (Jimmy Buffett)


End file.
